Top cooking apps: for beginners and amateur cooks

If you are new to cooking at home and want to keep things fresh, we've come up with a list of the best cooking apps to provide inspiration and help you out with your daily culinary efforts. With this selection, you'll not only get new recipe ideas but perhaps also discover a new passion and Masterchef-level skills!

Tasty

The best all rounder

Packed full of inspiration with over 4000 recipes, video tutorials and step-by-step instructions, Tasty app will keep you busy for hours. You can search for recipes (both baking and cooking) via dietary requirements, social plans, difficulty, speed, ingredients and more. You can also save your favourite recipes in the ‘My Recipes’ section and add your own. For those of you who live outside the US, Tasty app has included metric values alongside the US measurements in every recipe, so no need for approximations!

Download it for Android and iOS here.

Yummly

The one with all the recipes

Yummly is fast going to become your new best friend in the kitchen. Packed with over two million recipes from the best chefs worldwide, personalised recipe recommendations just for you and helpful videos and tools, there’s no limit to the culinary delights you will be able to whip up using Yummly. Providing inspiration in abundance, even if you suffer from allergies or are eating a paleo or vegan diet, Yummly will scour the web for personalised recipes suited to you. The app also offers step-by step guided tutorials and how-tos from well known chefs and bloggers and you can add entire recipes to your shopping list. A must have app, for beginners a pros alike.

Download it for both Android and iOS here.

Oh She Glows

Make healthy, vegan, tasty food

This one comes from New York Times bestselling author Angela Liddon, so you know you’re in good hands. Oh She Glows is a compilation of her most popular plant based recipes from the award winning blog. You can search and easily filter recipes using keywords, allergy and dietary info, meal category (ie breakfast), season and more. The app also provides detailed nutritional information for each recipe and beautiful, colourful photos to entice even the most sceptic meat-lover to try it out.

Oh She Glows is available to download for iOS and Android.

Green Kitchen

The healthy food porn app

This five star app is the perfect companion whether you are vegetarian or simply looking to add more greens into your diet. Green Kitchen boasts some of the most creative vegetarian recipes using minimal amounts of sugar, gluten and dairy products and the app contains the most beautiful photos-seducing you to try out the recipes. Green Kitchen provides over 150 recipes, a variety of snacks, main courses and drinks, estimated cooking times for each recipe and of course comprehensive step-by-step cooking instructions.

Download it for iOS here.

Sweet Tooth

Dessert recipes

No cooking app list would be complete without some desserts. Dessert Recipes is simple to navigate but also provides tutorials on how best to use the app. Packed with dessert recipes as the name promises, it includes cooking instructions, nutritional information, total preparation time and tips and tricks to avoid any missteps. As with many of the other apps, you can also create a shopping list with ingredients from recipes you want to try and Dessert Recipes also has a global search feature enabling you to discover thousands of new recipes.

Download it for Android here.

Just Desserts

Bake your cakes

Another top rated desserts app, Just Desserts boasts over 3,000 recipes in over 15 categories so no matter what the occasion, you’re bound to find something you want to try. The app has all the classic baking sections from cookies to cakes and everything in between, but also includes frosting and fillings recipes so you can perfect every last detail of your dessert. Just Desserts includes step-by-step instructions for each recipe, a favourites list so you can keep track of the recipes you love, organised search categories and a ‘Today’s Craving’ special feature to help you discover new desserts.